Quote from: Narmer;1027082What did the scholar class look like?

All scholars have a limited ability to heal a limited number of times per rest. There are two path, one to be a better healer and deals with things like herbs in more detail. The other focuses on lore and gathering information. The healing mechanics is a dice pool where you expend healing dice. Not only hit points can be healed but it can be used to remove disease, neutralize poison, and remove conditions. The remove condition turns out to be important as a lot of the "bad" things that can involve imposing a condition of some type.

I was kind of skeptical about the dice pool concept but it works well in practice. The flavor of it dovetails nicely with the other mechanics. The general gist that a healer can only do much until they need a considerable time (i.e. the fellowship phase) to rebuild their supplies and energy.

And knowledge is a big part of a AiME campaign and the Lore side has a lot of interesting flavor especially with dealing with animals and influencing people. There are abilities that allows a PC do some of what Saurman does.

Quote from: Larsdangly;1027057Slow combat is awesome when you are playing a board game about combat, but this has never been D&D's strong point. D&D is at its best when any given conflict can be resolved in 10-15 minutes, absolute maximum.

This what keeps me playing TSR editions. Long combats bore me both as a player and as a GM. I don't mind lots of combat so long as the vast majority of combats take 10-15 minutes maximum. In general, 5e seems to have shorter combats than 3.x or 4e, but 0e and B/X is still much faster than 5e. Better, they have less complex and faster character creation. Perhaps I ought to try to write up a variant that would work well for Middle Earth. If I base it on S&W Whitebox or S&W Continual Light (or even Microlite74), it probably would not be too hard. Finding the time to do it would be harder.

Lion & Dragon!

Quote from: RPGPundit;1027484Lion & Dragon!

Have you done it, or just a suggestion?

Quote from: estar;1027085All scholars have a limited ability to heal a limited number of times per rest. There are two path, one to be a better healer and deals with things like herbs in more detail. The other focuses on lore and gathering information. The healing mechanics is a dice pool where you expend healing dice. Not only hit points can be healed but it can be used to remove disease, neutralize poison, and remove conditions. The remove condition turns out to be important as a lot of the "bad" things that can involve imposing a condition of some type.

I was kind of skeptical about the dice pool concept but it works well in practice. The flavor of it dovetails nicely with the other mechanics. The general gist that a healer can only do much until they need a considerable time (i.e. the fellowship phase) to rebuild their supplies and energy.

And knowledge is a big part of a AiME campaign and the Lore side has a lot of interesting flavor especially with dealing with animals and influencing people. There are abilities that allows a PC do some of what Saurman does.

Thanks.

Quote from: RPGPundit;1027484Lion & Dragon!

Didn't you mean "Zweihander"?

Quote from: Larsdangly;1027489Have you done it, or just a suggestion?

No, I haven't done it myself. But I'm betting it would work.

Quote from: RPGPundit;1028118No, I haven't done it myself. But I'm betting it would work.

I think the basic structure of L&D would be quite appropriate, but that it would take a good 20+ pages of new material to do the conversion. You would need to introduce relevant races and classes, and introduce magic and religion that are aimed at the setting (L&D's is superb for medieval europe, but middle earth has a different sort of thing going on)

Well, the Cymri can be renamed "hobbit" pretty much out of the box;). But there are plenty of other things to houserule, yes.

Hobbits weigh something like 30-40 pounds, maximum. Any game that allows them to have ST scores loosely similar to humans is simply ridiculous. So, if I were adapting a game to middle earth I'd write them up as different from L&D's Cymri. Also, Cymri are basically magicians, which doesn't jive with hobbits either.

Quote from: Larsdangly;1028319Hobbits weigh something like 30-40 pounds, maximum. Any game that allows them to have ST scores loosely similar to humans is simply ridiculous.

You mean, like how they can have 16 Str in D&D:)?

QuoteAlso, Cymri are basically magicians, which doesn't jive with hobbits either.

True that, you'd have to rmove the magic part. But the Cymri basically get the best saving throws, which is, according to source material, what the hobbits should be the best at;)!

FWIW:

We just started a Burning Wheel 4th Age Middle Earth campaign focused on the reclaiming of Moria by a Dwarven party.  I realize that BW may not be to everyone's taste, but we are rocking (pun intended).  BW is built for this type of thing IMO. The Dwarven BITs have essentially layed out an entire campaign without reading a single word of an "adventure path".  And Greed!!!!  Each to their own, but BW engerizes both myself and my players like no other system that I have tried.  I will grant that I have a love/hate relation with the system and the author, but I have to also admit that BW produces the best gaming experiences I have encountered across systems, from both sides of the screen. The Firebeards are up against the Longbeards.  Throw in a mutual love interest and trading agendas, and we are already off to the (drama/conflict) races.

Quote from: Tyndale;1028378FWIW:

We just started a Burning Wheel 4th Age Middle Earth campaign focused on the reclaiming of Moria by a Dwarven party.  I realize that BW may not be to everyone's taste, but we are rocking (pun intended).  BW is built for this type of thing IMO. The Dwarven BITs have essentially layed out an entire campaign without reading a single word of an "adventure path".  And Greed!!!!  Each to their own, but BW engerizes both myself and my players like no other system that I have tried.  I will grant that I have a love/hate relation with the system and the author, but I have to also admit that BW produces the best gaming experiences I have encountered across systems, from both sides of the screen. The Firebeards are up against the Longbeards.  Throw in a mutual love interest and trading agendas, and we are already off to the (drama/conflict) races.

I get it - one thing about BW that is totally brilliant is the way the cannonical fantasy races (plus a few others, like wolves and spiders) are presented. It is honestly a better and more creative treatment of the inhabitants of Tolkein's world than any licensed game I've ever seen (including TOR). This motivated me to start a BW Middle Earth campaign years ago, but my players just wouldn't do it - the system is idiosyncratic in a couple of ways that are basically pointless (e.g., the damage wheel - as if anyone gives a shit about some new super complicated way of counting up damage!) and this put them off the whole exercise. The goofy parts of BW are not unplayabe - just unfamiliar and ill advised. If you can get over the activation energy of learning these parts of the game, I'm sure a great experience would be your reward. But I suspect you need the whole group to buy into the idea from the get go.

One thing I wonder about BW is whether it can be used to resolve large combats without the game play mechanics grinding to a halt. E.g., if your player characters get caught up in fights that resemble some of the sharp skirmishes in the book (Balin's Tomb, or the Passing of Boromir), there are something like a couple dozen combatants to keep track of. If you are playing D&D, you are good to go - 20 or even 50 orcs running around making a nuisance of themselves is no problem. If you are playing BW, what do you do? Perhaps there is a skirmish-scale combat sub-system I'm forgetting, but my recollection is that you can either play it using the scripted combat rules (really only suitable for duels or combats between 2-3 people on a side at most), or the abbreviated combat system, which doesn't require scripting but still has resolution mechanics and a damage and injury system that is going to take hours to sort through. I feel like this is a scale of combat you can't really just 'hand wave' and still have a good time playing a Middle Earth campaign.

Quote from: Larsdangly;1028252I think the basic structure of L&D would be quite appropriate, but that it would take a good 20+ pages of new material to do the conversion. You would need to introduce relevant races and classes, and introduce magic and religion that are aimed at the setting (L&D's is superb for medieval europe, but middle earth has a different sort of thing going on)

True, there would be things that would need to be changed.

Mind you, Middle-Earth is definitely not medieval Europe, but it is based on medieval European folklore.

Quote from: estar;1027065...AiME, a 5th edition variant, saves a ton work in running a Middle Earth campaign for a referee that otherwise a fan of classic edition. AiME not just 5e with flavor text but a reworking of all the "stuff" classes, items, and monsters to fully support a Middle Earth campaign. The core combat rules remain the same and how you do ability/skill checks remain the same.

The changes in conjunction with makes for a very different experience from 5e RAW with surprisingly little overhead over a classic D&D set of rules. More importantly all the heavy lifting mechanic wise (like axing magic users) have done.

Again I found my thinking "How can I make OD&D in the form of Swords & Wizardry work like this." Then I realize it was a lot of work for little gain  given how AiME used the 5th edition rules.

Well, I picked up AiME from my FLGS and have been going through it. You're right: it's impressive. It seems to have the Middle Earth feel correct, and I'm not seeing anything that feels off, to me. The books are also quite nice: I like the art (which is unusual -- I rarely find modern game art to my taste).

I know you've advocated (based on experience) just using it as being a lot less work, and I get where you're coming from, but I'm leaning towards writing up some OD&D classes and sub-classes based on the AiME classes and going with that. I haven't decided 100%, though...